Community Group: Knoydart Climate Action Group (Knoydart Foundation)

Researcher: Gary White, Environmental Consultant (Freelance Researcher with Agenda Resilience)

Location: Knoydart Peninsula, Lochaber

Conducting a carbon audit of households across the Knoydart peninsula, as part of a plan to create a climate action plan for the Knoydart Foundation

Lachie Robinson, Community lead at Knoydart Climate Action Group, said: 

We wanted to get people excited about it, … and give people some … sense of agency over their carbon footprint… it was just a really interesting process, having someone who’s an expert in the field, but it really didn’t feel like we were being lectured to. … We’re people in the community, putting pieces of the puzzle together and then Gary being able potentially to interpret what that means.

Phase 1 community-led research project

The Knoydart Foundation is a community-run charity that administers 17,200 acres of community-owned land on the Knoydart Peninsula, in the West Coast of Scotland north of Mallaig. In Phase 1 of the programme the group worked with Gary White, a freelance researcher from Agenda Resilience, to conduct a survey of household carbon usage in Knoydart. Working collaboratively with the researchers allowed the community to receive support with project planning and delivery, as well as specific training and access to household survey calculator tool they could adapt. They also engaged with the community throughout the project, holding three interactive workshops and providing individual feedback to the 31 households that had participated (out of 55).

Capacity Building Project

In Phase 2 the group planned to recruit an administrator to help with the group’s capacity to take forward the results of the survey and create a Knoydart Climate Action plan with the Foundation’s climate action Working Group, as part of their attempts to achieve net zero within the community. Examples of this included fund-raising for a community minibus and using the skills from the household survey to address other areas. Unfortunately, due to lack of capacity within the organisation and a change in roles for those leading on the project, they have not been able to progress with these plans at the current time.

Research impacts

The Knoydart Climate Action Group, which formed off the back of this project, acknowledged that although the process of getting people to do a household survey can be ‘challenging’, seeing results has made people in the community happy and excited to take further action. The project was purposefully designed as an iterative process, recognising that community capacity building was at the heart of the project, using the researcher as a trainer and someone who could signpost as opposed to “parachuting in and doing stuff”. In return, the researcher found the experience just as useful as a means of better understanding how this dynamic and very organised community has been so successful.

Both partners also reflected that the success of the collaboration came out of the researcher being present in the community, developing relationships, finding out what people’s needs and strengths are and then developing these to build skills and capacity within the community, with the researcher now seeing the community lead as someone who is “highly articulate around carbon and climate, and think[ing] about the impact of community action on carbon.”